Living Large in Britain with American Fridge Freezers and Range Cookers

The Americans are really good at one thing: being big. Their cars are big; their expansionist foreign policies are big; and their domestic appliances are big. Unlike their cars, which are appallingly bad for the environment, or their foreign policy, which is appallingly bad for everyone, American fridge freezers and range cookers are awesome additions to any home - particularly the traditionally stuffy homes of the Brits.

The British kitchen, usually, is the habitat of small and boring things. British fridge freezers, unlike American fridge freezers, are dumpy little boxes made of easily crackable ugly white plastic, only suitable for food storage if the house is occupied by a single person. The freezer compartment on British fridge freezers is laughable, usually giving enough space to hold one tub of ice cream, one bag of frozen peas and that ugly lump of encroaching ice that moves, like some kind of evil-tasting glacier, inexorably from the back of the fridge week after menacing week.

Range cookers are the heated equivalent of all this glorious space: like American fridge freezers, range cookers (which, as the name suggests, would look amply at home in the smokehouse of a 3 million acre ranch) are built according to the idea that more than one person might be living in a house. Range cookers have vast hobs (usually five or seven) sweeping over a pair of side-by-side ovens - so whole meals can actually be cooked all at the same time, without resorting to that peculiarly English device of "keeping everything warm", i.e., trapping it in overheated pots until everything's gone mushy.

Range cookers, again like American fridge freezers (and like old American cars, before Ford decided that "cool" meant "like an enormous radio controlled toy") are extremely stylish. They have something of the look of an industrial cooker, crossed with the plump comfort of an Aga. Generally, range cookers either get finished in super-modern heavy duty brushed metal, or pleasingly fat paints that make them look as though they have fallen through time from the 1950s, when having apple pie was a real treat and America hadn't taken over the universe. In a British kitchen, alongside American fridge freezers, range cookers look like home: a lot more appealing than the dumpy plastic nonsense the inhabitants of this green and pleasant land have, for too long, been content to call appliances.

American fridge freezers, by stark contrast, glory in their use of space. The freezer compartment in American fridge freezers is exactly the same size as the fridge bit: a device made possible by the fact that American fridge freezers are split vertically rather than laterally. American fridge freezers have a pair of swing doors: one side opens to reveal a fridge, in which as much storage space is enabled by the guts of the door itself as the bowels of the fridge; and the other side lets you into a freezer. Again, the door part of the freezer section holds almost as much stuff as the actual freezer: which means American fridge freezers can realistically support a whole family, rather than a single man who only eats ice cream.

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